Color Theory
SITE:BROOKLYN GALLERY, online group exhibition
Curator: Kaegan Sparks
In the series Fabricated Landscape, I give expression to landscapes from my life alongside landscapes that friends post on Instagram. Through the images of others, I try to verify the form and recreate the structure of landscapes from my memories. The expressions of the landscape are not loyal to a photograph or a distinct reality but to feelings, experiences, emotions, and memories related to a place or to an amalgam of places that unite into one work. In some of the works, the distance from the memory or the borrowed experience is expressed by careful color selection followed by establishing rules that create the landscape's structure, which is not entirely predictable in advance.
As I am influenced by the landscape photos of other people online, I confront questions such as: what is real or authentic, what belongs to us all and what is private, how my memory works, and what is a first-person experience versus a second-person experience ... in the age of social networks.
These works, made of units of fabric interwoven together without sewing or gluing, continue the modular series I have been exploring since 1999. In this series, for the first time, I present wall pieces with a double-layered structure that gives them increased presence. I introduce a new connection technique in strips that enables the continued play and study of color.
In the background: After 36 weeks of protests in Israel, I'm deeply attuned to color as a means of resistance. In the hands of the demonstrators, the blue and white of the Israeli flag shows they are defending the country against dictatorship. The eerie red garb of The Handmaid's Tale bears witness to the threat against women's and human rights if a messianic government takes hold. Pink and rainbows highlight the increasing vulnerability of the LGBTQ community. The black flags, t-shirts, and signs warn against the end of Israeli democracy or exclaim further there is "No Democracy with Occupation."
As a textile artist, color is also a refuge. Warm/Cool Diptych explores colors’ elusive interplay. Recent pieces look to the protests, taking their most abundant and fundamental material, cardboard, as a surface through which to interweave modules in the colors that fuel my resistance.
Curatorial Statement:
“Every act of seeing leads to consideration, consideration to reflection, reflection to combination, and thus it may be said that in every attentive look on nature we already theorise.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810)
“A dread of, nay, a decided aversion for all theoretical views respecting colour…has been hitherto found to exist among painters,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe near the end of his 1810 treatise Theory of Colours. However, he conceded, this was “a prejudice for which, after all, they were not to be blamed.” Goethe’s study of color issued from a personal crusade to “liberate the phenomena once and for all from the gloom of the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber”—that is, the prevailing notion in his age (and ours) that color is an aspect of light which can be rationally explained by the laws of physics. A century earlier, Isaac Newton’s optical experiments with prisms had yielded the ROYGBIV spectrum, a rubric with which he assigned each visible shade to a measurable wavelength of light. In “razing this Bastille”—Goethe’s dramatic metaphor for his attempt to dismantle the Newtonian paradigm—the German Romantic attempted to substitute Enlightenment science with a more subjective phenomenology. Maintaining that the human mind and spirit correspond intrinsically with the natural world, Goethe argued that knowledge of color could not be severed from our experience of it, including both sensory perception and emotional effect. Goethe’s color theory, which he hoped would be applied by practitioners from chemists to dyers to artists, inflected subsequent nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art ranging from J.M.W. Turner’s diaphanous seascapes to Hilma af Klimt’s mystical altarpieces.